BBC Phil/Storgårds – review

Friday 14 June 2013 12.30 EDT
First published on Friday 14 June 2013 12.30 EDT

This concert marked the culmination of John Storgårds's whistlestop tour of the Sibelian landscape with the BBC Philharmonic which presented all seven symphonies in the space of a week. Yet nothing is quite as condensed as the Seventh Symphony itself: a summation of a lifetime's reshaping of symphonic form, compressed into a single movement barely longer than a Mahlerian scherzo.

Sibelius likened the piece to a great river, in which all the formal elements dissolve into a single, fluid entity. It is a work in which Sibelius's innovations with flow were every bit as remarkable as Stravinsky's experiments with pulse; though Storgårds exerted magisterial control throughout, there were points at which his beat became almost illusory – now you see it, now you don't – like a fallen branch disappearing beneath the eddies and re-emerging further downstream.

The leaner, more classically influenced Third Symphony has a more graspable structure, though in later years, the composer came to believe it was really a chamber piece, heard to best advantage with around 50 players. The BBC Philharmonic has considerably more than that; yet the softly plucked cellos in the lullaby-like slow movement had the stealth and tenderness of a parent tiptoeing away from a sleeping child.

The Sixth is sometimes characterised as Sibelius's Cinderella symphony – it requires complete projects like this in order for it to come to the ball. Perhaps it's the austerity that puts people off – the ecclesiastical modes seem to contain the chill of dark mornings in remote Scandinavian churches – while the only relationship its four movements bear to a conventional symphony is that there are four of them. Sibelius stated that while other composers stirred cocktails, he offered pure spring water. In Storgårds, the BBC Philharmonic has a conductor capable of drawing directly from the source.

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